Wireless device communication is becoming increasingly prevalent. The wireless communication can include wireless devices, a source and destination, communicating directly with each other. For example, a cellular phone communicates with a cellular base station to provide voice connectivity to the public switched telephone network. Another example is a wireless local area network where wireless client devices communicate with an access point.
The data transfer of the communication can be one-way, from the source to the destination, or two-way, where data traffic also travels from the destination to the source. The maximum rate of throughput of data between the source and the destination, hereafter referred to simply as throughput, is an important quantity that characterizes the performance of the data channel between the source and destination. It is desirable to increase the throughput as much as possible.
In certain cases, it is desirable for the source and destination wireless devices to route or relay their data transmission through intermediate wireless devices. These intermediate devices are generally referred to as routers, repeaters, or relays. The intermediate devices may be needed when the source and destination are not within transmission range of each other. Other wireless devices can be used to relay the data forming a chain from the source to the destination, with each link in the chain being a wireless device is in transmission range of the originating device. The number of wireless devices in the chain may be as small as one, or as large as need be.
FIG. 1 shows a wire network 110 that can communicate with a destination via intermediate wireless routers 120, 130, 140, 150. The dashed lines between the routers indicate a link that has been formed between those routers. For example, node 120 can communicate directly with node 130, and vice-versa. However, to reach node 140, node 130 must communicate through nodes 120, and 140, and the network 110.
A half-duplex transceiver is a wireless device that can either transmit or receive, but not both at the same instant of time. An example of a half-duplex transceiver is that provided by a personal computer with an IEEE 802.11 interface. Wireless devices may also consist of a separate transmitter and receiver at each node. If transmitter and receiver can transmit and receive data from another node at the same time, the wireless device is called full-duplex transceiver. An example of a full-duplex transceiver is an IS-95 CDMA cell phone.
One prior art method of implementing of a chain or a mesh of wireless devices is used in wireless ad-hoc networks, as described by MANET, DARPA SURAN, etc. Two wireless devices communicate with each other by leveraging peer wireless devices to route or relay the data. The applications envisioned in such networks included battlefield (military) communications and mobile (civilian) networks.
Another prior art method that forms a chain of wireless devices is the transceivers and full-duplex repeaters that constitute the infrastructure of Metricom's network [U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,400]. The repeaters sit atop street lamp poles and relay information from client user modems to wired access points and vice-versa.
Wireless devices must be equipped with antennas in order to receive and transmit data. Omni-directional antennas transmit or receive signals with equal strength in all directions in the horizontal plane. If the antennas are not omni-directional, they are known as directional antennas, and these have radiation patterns that are not circularly symmetric in the horizontal plane.
Directional links are overly restrictive for many forms of terrestrial communication since they permit communication only a certain fixed direction at any given instant of time. For applications such as the prior art mentioned above, MANET and DARPA SURAN, directional links (in contrast to omni-directional links), are not usable since they would prevent formation of an ad-hoc mesh network between wireless devices in arbitrary directions. In these applications, there may not be prior knowledge of the direction between a given wireless device and another wireless device. Therefore aiming antennas with directional links presents a difficulty, especially when setting up communication using a chain of wireless devices that may be reconfigured based on changes in network of wireless devices including the introduction or malfunction of one of the devices.
It is desirable to have an apparatus and method for providing high throughput of data transmitted through a mesh network between a gateway and a client.